HUNGARIAN STUDIES 2. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1986]

Emery George: Textual Problems of Miklós Radnóti's Bor Notebook

MIKLÓS RADNÓTIS BOR NOTEBOOK 67 ("Seventh Eclogue"), Levél a hitveshez ("Letter to My Wife"), À la recherche.... Nyolcadik ecloga ("Eighth Eclogue"), and Erőltetett menet ("Forced March"). Sándor Szálai, the sociologist (1912-1983), for whom Radnóti prepared these copies at one of the Bor camps, was in a unit liberated by the Tito partisans in early to mid-October of 1944; on his journey back home, Szálai published some of the poems in provincial newspapers, preeminently at Temesvár. On arrival in Budapest, he delivered his manuscript copies of the five texts to authorized persons, most probably either to Ortutay or to Mrs. Radnóti; the copies then served as bases for the first publication of these poems in Radnóti's posthumous collection, Tajtékos ég.5 This took place probably no later than May of 1946, prior to the discovery of the manuscript of the Notebook. The latter was found upon exhumation of Radnóti's remains on 23 June ofthat year. We recall that the poet was executed and buried in the mass grave at Abda on or about 8 November 1944. Moisture, durint itsjubterranean stay of nearly twenty months, damaged the Notebook, rendering a goodly portion of the entries in the lower fourth of the document illegible.6 As simple inspection will show, however, only the texts of the five poems of which Radnóti had prepared copies were seriously affected. This enabled the 1948 editor of Radnóti's poems, Imre Trencsényi-Waldapfel, to print the five texts the poet had not copied—Gyökér and the set of four Razglednici ("Picture Postcards")—using as his editing copy the Notebook itself. Even here, not all editorial decisions remain unchallenged, but there is no question that Trencsényi-Waldapfel had a far easier time of it with his five texts than either he or Radnóti's subsequent editors would have had with the initial five, had they had to rely on the state of the evidence in the damaged Notebook alone. The edition of the Bor Notebook offered here proceeds in five parts: I. a list of special signs used, followed by sigla and description of sources; II. a diplomatic transcription of the contents of the Notebook, along with an apparatus of variant readings; III. textual commentary; IV. the constituted text of the Notebook; and V. an appendix, offering the texts of the Notebook in English translation. This last part differs in only a few particulars from English translations of Radnóti's ten last poems as printed in my translated edition of the complete poems of Miklós Radnóti.7 A translation of the initial draft of "Eighth Eclogue" is offered here for the first time. Smaller variants are not translated; the aim of the appendix is to furnish a textually and poetologically sound equivalent for the constituted text as printed in part IV. Such equivalence broaches its own problems; in both substance and spirit I follow principles of verse translation as discussed both in my 1980 translation and in an article published in The Kenyon Review in 1982.8 While problems of decipherment and the evaluation of readings are the subject of the commentary in part III, it might be useful here to offer a prefatory remark on mechanics of procedure. A decipherment and transcription concentrate, and invite concentration, upon visual particulars. In the diplomatic text as given in part II, every 5*

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